Kimberly Steele

 According to the US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS):

U.S. health care spending grew 9.7 percent in 2020, reaching $4.1 trillion or $12,530 per person.  As a share of the nation's Gross Domestic Product, health spending accounted for 19.7 percent.

When my commercial lease expired earlier this year, I was hoping to make the jump into another commercial space where I could start a library and education center.  I may have had the creative urge and the mojo to make the center happen, but I certainly lacked the funds.  Commercial space is expensive.  When I looked around, I found the usual array of places that had stood vacant for years.  The average going price for a modestly sized, 2000 square foot, one bathroom portion of a building was $3500 a month.  As a private music teacher, I don't charge my students enough to cover that price nor do I want to do that.  For 25 years, I have sought to keep my prices affordable so my "product", which I believe is exceptionally good, can benefit people who are in the middle class and not just a set of upper middle class elites who can afford it.  

The cheapest place I found was a storefront on a minor thoroughfare in a strip mall complex.  They didn't return my calls or emails after I proposed a $1500 a month offer -- they wanted $2500 or bust.  The space is still vacant.  Guess what's there?  A physical therapist and a pharmacy/medical equipment dealer.  Keep in mind the building is within walking distance of a CVS pharmacy.  One block down the street, there is a building with several doctors offices in it.  Less than a mile away, there is a gargantuan hospital campus the size of a small town.

The medical industry has our civilization by the balls.  Hospitals have metastasized into brutalist empires of constantly expanding blobs of steel, concrete, and fifteen thousand dollar machines.  Dentists proliferate in strip malls and office buildings; they are more common than hairdressers.  Despite the onslaught of the Pfizer documents (Pfizer wanted to hide them for the next three quarters of a century but failed in that cover-up) and the hard, cold fact that no test animals survived the MRNA vaccine trials, there are vaccination centers in every chain drugstore.  if one cannot achieve becoming a human test subject at Walgreen's, there is always some brand of the experimental bioweapon available in the mall or at the doctor's office.  

Nobody is exempt from needing medical care, though I am trying my darnedest.  None of us can truly opt out.  The last time I had regular health insurance coverage was the year 2012, which was right around the time my husband was booted out of the salary class when the company he worked for went the way of the Hindenburg.  I had health insurance for a couple of brief stints of a year or so tied to my husband's employment, but unfortunately it was Obamacare one of those stints, which ended up being financially punishing in the extreme.  I have not had health insurance at all since 2017 and I have no plans ever to have it again, come what may.  Luckily for me I have no congenital defects or chronic conditions.  I also have the basic understanding that my health is not someone else's responsibility and if I squander it, it's on me.  The trouble arises if I sprain an ankle or need a root canal.   Some things cannot be helped.  I'd rather take my chances though because the health insurance "product" and its accompanying medications is simply not a luxury a lower-middle class person like me can afford.  

To my horror, I realized that almost everyone I know in the upper middle class either works for the government or Big Medicine in some capacity.  The kids I grew up with in upper middle class suburban Chicagoland whose dads were not architects had dads and moms who worked for the local laboratories (government) or at the hospital as nurses (medicine).  A girl I was friends with had a mom who worked with insurance companies and a dad who was a big wig at a utility company.  Many had parents working at the local prisons (government) or as teachers or school administrators (government) and of course there was no shortage of hospital administrators (medicine). Very few lacked connection to a government or medical job, and the ones who did were often of far more modest means than the Big Medicine or Big Government beneficiaries.

There are three legs to the iron triangle of the grift economy that now collapses all around us.  The first leg is Big Government.  The second is Big Medicine, which I believe accounts for far more than 19.5 percent of the real economy as cited by the CMS.  The third is Everybody Else, the motley collection of independents increasingly crowded out or coerced into joining the grifts of the other two triangle legs.  

Where Have the Vegans Gone?

Vegans are a collective group that have never failed to surprise me in their capacity for hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance.  I am vegan and I fully plan to stay that way for the rest of my life, but I often wonder how I got here because vegans are some of the absolute worst people this planet has to offer.  My distrust of Big Pharma and Big Medicine are shared by other vegans -- or at least that's what I used to think. 

For instance, I will pick two prominent vegans out of my hat at random: popular Youtuber Mic the Vegan and Kip Andersen, creator of Cowspiracy and Seaspiracy.  It's especially interesting that two prominent vegans continue their quest to save animals by promoting the health and environmental benefits of veganism yet have nothing to say about forced MRNA vaccines.  Kip Andersen has done a heroic job exposing the hidden malfeasance of Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Media, Big Government, and Big Insurance when it comes to the promotion of eating animals and animal secretions.  Yet when it concerns a vaccine from Anthony Fauci, a person who forced foster children to suffer through AIDS so he could profit from their suffering, Kip is nowhere.  Fauci funded NAIAD, a group whose "scientists" literally tortured beagles to death by putting their heads in containers where they could be eaten down to the skull by sandflies.  Once again, Kip is radio silence, along with other ostensibly left-leaning vegans.  Vaxpiracy is not in the works anytime soon.

Mic the Vegan has a photograph of himself on Instagram where he sports a homemade mask and says something about it being comparable to an N85.  Mic the Vegan comes from a place of well-researched health expertise, yet even he has failed to understand the mask as a brainwashing tool.  Masks have no utilitarian purpose, they do not prevent the spread of any respiratory disease, including Covid-19, and they reduce the flow of oxygen to the brain.  We are left to wonder whether or not Mic the Vegan got vaccinated or boostered.  I hope he skipped it.  

When I vacated the commercial space my lesson studio had occupied for 13 years, I had to re-home my two pianos, an upright and a grand.  The grand piano ended up in my parents' living room where it seems quite at home.  The upright went to my little house in Aurora.   My two cats have different attitudes towards the upright.  To Shadow, my black cat, it is just another object to climb and sit upon.  To Ash, my thoughtful gray cat, it is a source of fascination.  One of my piano students, a little girl aged 6, loves seeing the cats when she has her lesson.  During one of her recent lessons, Ash watched and listened from a nearby chair in rapt attention as she played her songs for the week.  When the keys are exposed, Ash takes special care to walk over them and not on them.  I suspect Ash will end up as a keyboardist or at least a musician in one of his future lives.

Once I asked, "What's it like to be a god?" 

I got an answer.  I'm not sure who answered.  It/he/she said: "It's like trying to teach an amoeba to play the piano."

In other words, I think the entity who answered me was trying to sum up how much patience and benevolence it takes to work with our species.  I also believe the entity was implying not all gods have interest in teaching amoebas to play the piano -- of course they don't.  It is human vanity that makes some of us think that human evolution and development is the summum bonum of a god's work.  The gods willing to work with us are very special.  It was our bumbling mistake to (temporarily) forget about them in favor of the false gods of Progress and other demons who told us what we wanted to hear.  I think our species is beginning to rectify that long series of errors though, slowly but surely, one person at a time.

Doctor Strange's Magical Shapes

If you've seen the movie or read the comic Dr. Strange, you know it's about a brilliant surgeon who gets into a car accident, nearly loses the use of his hands, and goes to Tibet in order to find an alternative healer.  He falls in with a weird group of ascetic monks in Kathmandu and learns magic.  Doctor Strange first appeared as a Marvel comic in 1963.  Though he was ostensibly created by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee, the character has more than a dash of Eliphas Levi and Manly P. Hall.  Dr. Strange and his posse spend a great deal of time reading old books, shaping and controlling their minds, and drawing magical symbols into the air.   

Back in the real, non-comic book world, we have the Sphere of Protection or SoP, one of many revived banishing rituals from Western magic.  The goal of the SoP is to create the non-literal, imaginary version of Dr. Strange's glowing pentacles and portals.  Dr. Strange can actually walk through the dimensional portals he creates to escape from his enemies into a desert or a mountainous taiga.  My landscapes exist in my mind.  Just like Doctor Strange, the better I am at drawing the magical shapes, the stronger my power becomes.  Unlike the good Doctor, I have an edge.  The gods help me with my shapes and they connect with me through the landscapes.  They help me in my daily practice to restore the balance I (along with the rest of humans) have lost.

Astral Gunk

Before I did the SoP, I had an astral gunk problem.  The astral plane is gunky enough right now that I often still have it though I never miss an SoP.  I can tell when it is gunky when I lay down to go to sleep and my mind races with images despite my intention to settle down and go to sleep.  There isn't much of a cure for this condition outside of constant prayer, which is why I sing the Orphic hymns.  When a popular music ear worm is burrowing through my brain in the astral muck, I replace it with one or more of the Orphic hymns for which I have composed music.  In this way I am able to bring gods closer and to drive demons further away.

The trouble with the time before I did the SoP was the closeness of the astral gunk.  Without any protection, the discord and upset of the modern collective astral caked me and insulated my poor, tormented brain from divine influence.  No wonder I saw God as indifferent, far away, and in the worst case scenario, non-existent.  The SoP repels the gunk like a daily shower repels body odor.  Prayer does this as well.  In the old days, the Catholic mass served the purpose for large masses of people.  These days, not so much.  

Demons Desire Dissolution

Demons are in their Golden Age right now.  Forget the horror movies that fixate on Satan being born a la Rosemary's Baby or Damien: that part of Revelations has already occurred.  Look at the broken families, the rioters with pink and purple hair and face tattoos labeling themselves as peaceful protestors, and the lies coming out of every pretty talking head on an airport TV screen.  This is Hell and we're soaking in it.  The Antichrist isn't just born, he's come of age, found a mate, and he's had his own pile of kids.  He'll become a grandpa soon, if current trends are any indication.

As a vegan I had multiple opportunities to join a group of violent Marxists called Direct Action Everywhere or DXE.  DXE was the group known for its PeTA-like antics of sending groups of people into restaurants and grocery stores to shame them for eating meat.  Unsurprisingly, DXE ate itself within a few years of its creation when it became apparent that nearly all of its founders and higher ups were grifters and sexual predators.  That's the problem with using shame as a weapon -- if you have a great deal to be ashamed of, it will come back to bite you.  DXE's approach was one of dissolution.  Though DXE stood for direct action, its actions were always fixated on dismantling the "evil" work of others instead of building up the powers of good.  If they were being truthful, they would have called it Dismantle Times Everything.  Demons want to dismantle things.  When Antifa or some random feminist agitator speaks of dismantling the Patriarchy, what they are actually talking about is the urge of demons to smash the good works of others into smithereens.  Clogged with astral gunk, the unwitting tools of demons become saturated with poison until their own families and friends are dismantled.  Religious practices designed to send the gunk away have become poisoned as the gunk itself, for instance a church service I once attended with an Erma Bombeck styled comedian who sought to convert Christians but was a thinly-veiled recruiter for the Prosperity Gospel.  In my opinion, Joel Osteen's Prosperity Gospel and its McChurch ilk is straight up Satanic, which is why I'll have nothing to do with it.

The funny thing about those who claim to fight demons and the demonic is how ass-backwards their approach is.  If I want to clear a clog from my drain, I don't attempt to force it out by clogging the sewer with more hair and other crap.  Any materialist approach to unclogging the astral is inherently doomed, which is why donating money to Joel Osteen never helped anyone get to heaven.  Antifa's antics create more miasma than they dissipate.  Smashing the windows of someone's store only helps the demons driving you to hurt others and eventually kill yourself and your family, especially if your motivation to smash the store's windows was materialistic, such as wanting the expensive shoes inside.

Hexing, cursing, and rioting only give the other side the appearance of being more virtuous.  That's why I don't do it.  I am very good at hexing and cursing as I have often explained.  I have dark, dark thoughts that are the product of my wacky past lives and my current quirks -- I just don't act on them.  I know a thing or two about it.  I don't do it though, because I'd rather not backslide into astral gunk.  I've already been there and it sucks; no thanks.  I no longer allow myself to become like the evil I want to dismantle.  I do want to dismantle tyranny, for sure, I've just had an epiphany that made me realize I was going about it wrong back when I was full of astral gunk.   The first step to get out of the hole is to stop digging.  This amoeba, with copious help, will learn to play the piano... eventually.

Not much has changed about the elite CEO set. They subsist as parasites, but unlike tapeworms, it’s always summertime and the living is easy. Under the elite boss class is a huge army of women who do all the work. Among these women are a few beta males who must come to terms with their non-CEO status.

The Harem Model

My Studio

Wish me luck, I’ll need it.

The old Studio in happier days.

The piano I named Rex.

Set up for a piano recital.

Thanking the space on the chalkboard wall. The landlord made my husband and I erase it before we left.

For a former atheist, I spend a lot of time praying, probably because I am making up for lost time.  One of the most amazing things that has happened since approximately six years ago when I began to believe in gods for the first time in this incarnation was the connection I felt with the spirits of place. 

The Obviousness of Animism

Humans are animists by nature.  Consider how reliably often we attribute human characteristics to objects and non-human animals, especially when we are dealing with children.  When I was growing up, there was a deli/market on the corner that had an ugly, 1950s era sign of an anthropomorphic hotdog holding up a plate with a sliced sausage on it.  My friend darkly and hilariously commented that the hot dog appeared to be serving up its own son.  Anthropomorphism is just another form of animism.  Animism has been right in front of our faces this entire time.

One of the primary reasons the Industrial Age is so marked by psychosis is the denial of animism.  Romantic art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) hated animism and coined the term “pathetic fallacy” in an attempt to discourage animism and the personification of objects and places.  According to Ruskin, “objects ... derive their influence not from properties inherent in them ... but from such as are bestowed upon them by the minds of those who are conversant with or affected by these objects."  Despite his own adoration of wild spaces, he was horrified by the idea of actually having a conversation with them.  Ruskin was awed by wild spaces but also determined not to communicate with them, which smacks of the legacy of certain brands of Christianity.  God is a distant, omnipotent judge, serenely uninvolved yet exceedingly jealous and wrathful.  Recognition of any place, animal, or object as human-like is idolatry.  This binary attitude of God = good vs. Spirit of place=bad was an easy, slippery slope to the barren pastures where we now find ourselves in the Industrial Age.  Removing God from the everyday while engaging in the fallacy that He has blessed us with material prosperity because we deserve it was the first mistake.  The second was the attempt to prevent the natural urge to talk to the spirits of place unless it was in the form of a children’s movie or within the similar cacomagic of advertising. 

The goofy thing about the spirit of place is how darn obvious it is.  The landscape tells us most of what we need to know just by looking at it.  Mountains are huge and awe-inspiring.  Rivers represent the fast flow of energy cutting through the land.  Traffic jams are hell on earth.  Office parks are ugly and have deleterious effects on the psyches of anyone who has to dwell within them.  A good, well-kept home feels cozy and nurturing.  A neglected home feels scary.

If you’ve felt any of those things when in similar places, you’ve had a deep perception of the spirit of place.  If you can get over John Ruskin’s weird mental hangups about being “pathetic”, the next logical step is to say “Hi, how are you?”  I have never been saner in my life and I talk to places all the time.  It sure as hell beats not talking to them.  If this is pathetic, welcome to the Loser’s Club!

Accents and Idioms

One way the land manifests itself through us is by accents and idioms.  The reason Culiacán Spanish is vastly different from Barcelona Spanish is because of the stamp the land spirit leaves upon the people via language.  The particular region where I was born and raised, Chicago, has a distinct version of “English” that incorporates long, nasal AAAAH sounds.  When I am teaching students to sing, I often train them to avoid nasal sounds, and there is no better way of doing this than showing them what not to do.  I affect my most obnoxious Chicagoan accent and drawl “WHITE SAAAAAAHX DAAAAAHT CAAAAAAHM!” (Whitesox.com) in order to demonstrate this peculiar regional habit.  The northern Illinois drawl, for all of its problems, is not elitist or snobby.  There is a homespun, pragmatic quality to the accent, and it is the legacy of workaholics who could not be bothered to elevate their manner of speech in order to fit in with visiting European dignitaries. 

The spirit of place lives within us and we live within it.  Canada is a sparsely populated land with a tormented history of Native persecution much like the United States.  The idea of Native suffering often gets in the way when we Americans try to connect with the land.  Though it is not an excuse, neither Canada nor the US are unique in this respect.  The Han Chinese once colonized the Japanese island of Hokkaido, decimating the aboriginal Ainu peoples; this fact does not mean anyone should be ashamed to be Japanese.  When shame is put into order with proper limits and boundaries, we can see the place we dwell within.  Yes, the place may have been somewhat ruined or disgraced, but it is obviously worth living in or we would not choose to live there.  I am no fan of highways or suburban subdivisions, but I choose to live here, so my best bet is to appreciate what I have and make the best out of it. 

Certain Astral Pyramids Not Welcome Here

Canadians need only glance at a few photographs of the land where they dwell to be awed by its hugeness and open spaces.  Like its neighbor slightly to the south, there is a great deal of room.  It’s easy to be captivated by the desire to wander such incredible vastness, and many have done just that.  Others have been content to hunker down in the big cities that inevitably spring from a big land.  Overall, there is the feeling in the Americas that the land is OK with us doing our own thing and exploring our own unique ways of being.  We can scatter to the four winds if we so choose.  We can reject the astral pyramids of others and skip off to be ourselves and create structures of our own.

When the astral pyramid of communism arrived on the European and Asian continents, it was a way of replacing the failing, dying pyramids of Christianity and Buddhism.  These monotheist pyramids, however, were past their primes a hundred years before they attempted a worldwide coup in the forms of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.  Past defeats have not stopped communism from another desperate grasp for the gold ring in the form of coronavirus-related restrictions and lockdowns.  Communism in its latest Agenda 21 form is a violent hiccup from the death throes of monotheism.  In the Age of Aquarius, there is no One God or One Way.  The spirit of the American land is not communist and communism will not work here.  I would argue that it is also decidedly not monotheist.  We have many gods here and many of them are willing to reach out and cultivate relationships with the willing and the respectful.

The mass Enlightenment so many long for will never arrive: this is not the nature of Meatworld.  There has been chatter about “waking up” some great, old force, but it was never asleep.  We were the ones who slumbered while it went about its business.  What may have changed is our awareness of it.  When I began to feel its movements, I was happy because it meant I had finally done enough spiritual work to become vaguely conscious of its magnificence. 

There was a video made of the Canadian trucking convoy that was about 13 minutes of “thank yous” to the truckers for their bravery.  Though it probably escaped most people’s notice, I perceived this video as decisive.  I believe the Canadian convoy will usher in an era of freedom for Canada. The atheist-communists of the Coronatarian movement will lose because they have no gratitude.  They are eaten by the wendigos of greed and power.  They are remarkably greedy and narcissistic, much like Justin Trudeau, who clearly sees himself as designated to be rich and powerful instead of rich and powerful because he was born into a wealthy, influential family.  Trudeau seems to believe he can have merit as a total ingrate, yet he is consumed by his desire for power in direct proportion to the privilege he dismisses as granted.  The Canadian elites think of themselves as little gods.  They believe they can dominate the Great Land Spirit because they are special and chosen.  They are wrong.

Just as the Donner Party headed into the wilderness thinking they would live in the lap of abundance at the end of their journey, the Canadian communist-atheist elite has vastly underestimated and misunderstood the spirit of the land.  Communism may have sort of worked in China or Russia for a time, but the American lands have no patience for it.  The best way of getting a land spirit to ignore or even actively seek to destroy you is to deny its existence and then constantly act as an annoying pill by attempting to spread a dated, faux-monotheist pyramid scheme.  You don’t wander into the Canadian wilderness with the attitude nature will provide: it will eat you.  Many have found this out the hard way in the same fashion as those who followed Sir John Franklin, the naval officer who repeatedly led hundreds of men to gruesome deaths in search of the Northwest passage.  We see the same narcissistic “I AM HUMAN HEAR ME ROAR” streak in Canadian elitists, who honestly believe the forces of Progress will conquer all.  It is my opinion they are about to be schooled to the contrary; make of that what you will.